We build a theory of political turnover in autocracies where citizens can only express their political preferences to remove the autocrat through costly mass protest. The disenfranchised are imperfectly informed about the autocrat's choice of economic institution. Workers only observe economic...

This paper considers the role of asymmetric information in a political agency theory of autocratic economic policy-making. Within the context of a static game, we analyze the strategic interaction between a self-interested elite ruling class, who may extract rent ineciently through hidden...

This paper presents an agency theory of revolutionary political transitions from autocracy to democracy. We model authoritarian economic policy as the equilibrium outcome of a repeated game between an elite ruling class and a disenfranchised working class, in which workers have imperfect...

This paper aims to understand the pattern of the labor share of income during the devel- opment process. We highlight a U-shapped relationship between development and the labor share. Our theory emphasizes the interplay between rms'monopsony power and the size of the informal sector when the...

This paper aims to clarify the role of market regulations in rent creation and rent sharing. For each country-industry-year observation, the rent size (RS), measured by the value added price relative to the GDP price, is assumed to depend solely on direct anti-competitive regulations (ACR) on...

We address the effects of FDI on the labor share in developing countries. Our theory relies on the impacts of FDI on wage and labor productivity in a frictional labor market. FDI have two opposite effects on the labor share: a negative force originated by technological advance, and a positive...

This paper explores the extent to which episodes of democratization can be explained by variation in income inequality. Modern empirical tests of this relationship have generally yielded null results, which we argue follow from the estimation of mis-specified models. Guided by a theoretical...

Reductions in the generosity of welfare benefits and less progressive taxation have decreased the redistributive impact of fiscal policy since the mid-1990’s across the advanced democracies. We argue that the strong increase in the diversity of goods observed those last decades may have...